The Storage Space Dilemma
If you are anything like me, you left your longtime home of Chicago in August of 2015, trailing behind you a dark, sticky trail of failure and rejection. The wife and I were not able to finagle a moving truck so when we left Chicago we took only what our beat-up Honda Fit could hold, and leaving the rest in a storage locker on the north side of Chicago.
The plan was to go back at some point with an automobile, preferably, and liquidate the contents of the storage space so that we can stop paying monthly fees. Truth to be told, I sold a lot of my belongings, particularly DVDs and Blu-Rays, in the awful aftermath of my firing from my last and perhaps final job, just to pay the mortgage and keep the lights on. I picked away at the collection upon subsequent return visit home to Chicago but our plan to come back and empty out the storage never came to pass.
This brings us to today. My wife is understandably eager to stop paying our storage space rental, to the point where we are planning on having the storage space company simply throw out everything remaining in the storage space for a fee.
I would be okay with that. I’m very good at accepting unfortunate things, particularly loss and rejection, because I’ve had no choice to accept those things or go mad.
That said, I would prefer not to simply part ways with everything that remains in that storage locker. True, it’s a whole lot less than I began with, two and a half years ago, and it’s not like there a bunch of Norman Rockwell original paintings in there but there is an awful lot of DVDs and books and clothes and mementos and personal items would prefer not to be dumped en masse into a nearby dumpster.
Losing a lot, and walking away from a lot, has taught me patience and acceptance. But it’s also instilled in me a desire to hold onto the things I have in my life, to hold onto what I have because I’ve lost so much.
So I was hoping that instead of throwing out everything that remains in my storage space, I could hold a soiree of sorts and when I return to Chicago the weekend of April 6th and 7th to see “Weird Al” Yankovic perform at the Vic, I could invite y’all to a “Giving Away my belongings” party at the storage space and y’all could take my DVDs and books and curios and whatnot instead of me throwing all that stuff away.
It could be a whole change-of-life thing. Finally saying goodbye to Chicago completely before, in a development all too in keeping with my relationship with Chicago, strangers hurl my once-cherished belongings into the trash, never to be seen again. I’d need to raise a little bit of money to justify keeping the storage locker open for the next two months, so if anyone wanted to make a donation to the Nathan Rabin Archives Liquidation Fund I sure would not reject it.
I’m hoping, God willing, to tour behind “Weird Al” Yankovic’s 2018 tour the way I did Phish, and turn the experience into an article/Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place pieces/extension of the Weird Accordion to Al book project and this seems like something that would be great to write about, especially since the leg of the tour I’m hoping to hop onto and write about would take me from my longtime home of Chicago to my new home of Atlanta.
Honestly, is there a more appropriate way to meet me, or reconnect with me, than in these weird, tragicomic but mostly just comic circumstances? It’ll be like that Raymond Carver adaptation where Will Ferrell plays a depressed alcoholic giving away his belongings, only somehow even more depressing! To make things even less depressing, we can go from the Giving Away my Belongings Party to see “Weird Al” Yankovic perform at the Vic. How sweet would that be? Answer: pretty sweet.
I don’t know what it says about the shape my life has taken that giving away my belongings to strangers is now the best case scenario, since its far preferable to the alternative of just throwing everything out.
Think of it as a Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place/Happy Cast meet-up with a purpose!
So please do email me at nathanrabin@sbcglobal.net if you’re interested. It helps if you live in Chicago because Christ is my junk not worth making a trip to the city for. I apparently have about 36 hours to pull this off before we go with the throwing everything out option.
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